How much are localisation and translation team people involved into the global dev team ?

My question may be a bit confusing but I am sometimes (no that often thankfully) surprised how the translation of a dialogue or a text can feel disconnected from the game. The best example I have in my mind is during LS3E1 when our character ask if what we are looking at is a feed from the egg chamber. It turned out in French as translated Feed as "mangeoire", the object in which an animal eats. Rytlock then answers about breaking into it.... this created in the end a dialogue that was not really understandable (had to check the wiki afterwards to understand).
Yet, the word may have both translations but just looking at what is happening in the game may have given the right translation.

So I wonder what is the workflow here between story writing and translation? Are the people who translates involved with the writing team to be on point of where the story goes, who are the person speaking (for example people from GW1), how to be sure to prepare a revelation ... or is the amount of text so huge that it is simply not possible that the translators can discuss with every dev in case there is ambiguous translations? Related to this, given that an episode involves many writers, how many translators are working for each language?

Comments

Hi there,
These are really great questions and examples regarding missing contexts in translations when it comes to story content. Currently, our respective language teams each consist of two persons localizing for each language. I work as part of the German team . I am going to give my answer to this question as someone who is pretty new to the team and company, so these are the processes that we are currently following.
GW2 is language-heavy game, containing millions of words. We do our very best to always find the most fitting localized content to suit context, but depending on the volume of text in each episode and the production time given to work on content, some context in translations can get lost, but we try our best to avoid this happening. Generally, we also test each set of content after having localized the text, to make sure that the translations we created work for what is happening in the game.
I can’t speak for older content, as I was not part of the team then, but I CAN say that our team works with the Narrative team to clarify any missing context that could come up while we localize. We have regular meetings and also make sure to sit down together for table reads when an episode is being worked on. This way, we can provide input about each language and culture throughout the English writing process.

Hi,
The reason behind awkward translation is usually not our translators lack of linguistic skills (or ours), but the lack of time we have to investigate and check the context of each line... and then to test in-game.
Once the text content has been implemented in the game, it's very unlikely we'll have a chance to come across it in the game. That's why it's so great to have players like yourself who write bugs to let us know where we failed, or where our predecessors failed.
As Alexandra said, the current team works now with the narrative to get a more holistic understanding of the story, which was not the case a few years ago. We cannot talk for our predecessors but nowadays, we try to clarify every doubt we have about translations, but sometimes, we just get it wrong, or we understand it the wrong way.
So please, send over bugs on the Localization forum so we can have a precise second look at the issues you found.

Thank you so much for your question,
See you on the forum ( le français)

Thank you for your answer. It's always hard to ask such question without appearing too rude towards the people who do the work. It is good though to know that localization people and story writers are working closer now... it will surely be for the best!
In any case I am not ready to stop playing in French, at least because I really love the voice cast, especially the actress voicing Marjory (on a side note, is it Maik Darah?)